‘I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.’

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, first French edition: 1972

‘The text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture (…) There is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it was, but the reader (…) The birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.’

Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, first French edition: 1967

‘I only speak one language, (and, but, yet) it is not mine.’

Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other or, The Prosthesis of Origin, first French edition: 1996

‘There are two ways to lose oneself: walled segregation in the particular or dilution in the “universal.” My conception of the universal is that of a universal enriched by all that is particular, a universal enriched by every particular: the deepening and coexistence of all particulars.’

Aimé Césaire, Letter to Maurice Thorez, first French edition: 1956

‘Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari criticized notions of the root and, even perhaps, notions of being rooted. The root is unique, a stock taking aIl upon itself and killing aIl around it. In opposition to this they propose the rhizome, an enmeshed root system, a network spreading either in the ground or in the air, with no predatory rootstock taking over permanently. (…) Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I calI the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.’

Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, first French edition: 1990

‘We began to explore this question in Semiotext(e) magazine: was there an equivalent to French thought in the United States? How could we break into a foreign milieu?’  

Sylvère Lotringer 

‘The intention of ‘Schizo-Culture’ was to bring post-68 philosophy into the new world and expose it to the outside, rather than returning to the text.’

Sylvère Lotringer

‘Artists have always been consistently five years ahead of academia in relation to French Theory, but it didn’t always translate into texts, or when it did, as happened with curators, whose texts are now proliferating, it had a tendency to turn into turgid lingo mostly meant to acquire some kind of legitimacy’

Sylvère Lotringer 

‘Most of my friends were people whose work was as important to me intellectually as French theory (…) I thought it would be great if Semiotext(e) published these authors: in my view, their work was a perfect application of Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of subjectivity.’

Chris Kraus

‘A myth always refers to events alleged to have taken place long ago. But what gives the myth an operational value is that the specific pattern described is timeless; it explains the present and the past as well as the future. This can be made clear through a comparison between myth and what appears to have largely replaced it in modern societies, namely, politics.’

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, first French edition: 1958

‘Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder.’

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, first French edition: 1961

‘For there is no sex. There is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses. It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary.’

Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, first French edition: 1992

‘The Revolution might have been expected to change the fate of woman. It did nothing of the kind. This bourgeois revolution respected bourgeois institutions and values; and it was waged almost exclusively by men.’

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, first French edition: 1949

‘That is why artists, writers, and scholars, who hold in trust some of the most exceptional accomplishments of human history, must learn to use against the state the freedom that the state assures them.’

Pierre Bourdieu, Free Exchange, conversation with Hans Haacke, first French edition: 1997

‘The colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.’

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on colonialism, first French edition: 1950

‘The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations.’

Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Eart, first French edition: 1961

‘It is exhilarating to imagine, on these tropical lands finally restored to their inner truth, the lasting and fruitful harmony between man and soil. Under the banner of the plant. We are finally called upon to know ourselves, and before us lie splendors and hopes.’

Suzanne Césaire, Tropiques, no 1, first French edition: 1941 

‘One should recognize that ” society […] puts itself in the position of the mother: it is accused of forbidding desires, but I find that mostly it dictates them, imposes them, forces their satisfaction.’

Roland Barthes, The neutral ; lecture course at the College de France (1977-1978), first French edition: 1978

‘Sex is not that part of the body which the bourgeoisie was forced to disqualify or nullify in order to put those whom it dominated to work. It is that aspect of itself which troubled and preoccupied it more than any other, begged and obtained its attention, and which it cultivated with a mixture of fear, curiosity, delight, and excitement.’

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality; Volume I: An Introduction, first French edition: 1976

‘The women say, the men have kept you at a distance, they have supported you, they have put you on a pedestal, constructed with an essential difference. They say, men in their way have adored you like a goddess or else burned you at their stakes or else relegated you to their service in their back-yards. […] They say, oddly enough what they have exalted in their words as an essential difference is a biological variation.’ 

Monique Wittig, Les Guerrillères, first French edition: 1969

‘It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.’

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, An Essay on Abjection, first French edition: 1980

‘It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.’

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, An Essay on Abjection, first French edition: 1980 

‘Abjection is simply the inability to assert with sufficient power the imperative act of exclusion of abject matters (which constitutes the foundation of collective existence).’

Georges Bataille, L’Abjection et les formes misérables, first French edition: 1934 

‘I do not accept that I did not create my own body, and I despise and abject as cowardly any being who accepts to live without first creating themselves anew.’

Antonin Artaud, Texte préparatoire à « Paris-Varsovie », Œuvres, first French edition: 1948